Set up photo uploading to Google Photos / Picasa via email?

Picasa is poised to go through a major revision in the next few weeks as it's tied into - and rebranded for - Google Plus. In fact, the industry buzz is that it's going to be renamed "Google Photos" and will gain support through a new iPhone app that's also tied to the Google Plus service. We'll see.

Meanwhile, if you search the App Store you'll see that there's no official Picasa application from the Google team even after having owned the company for a few years. Surprising. There are third party apps, but that's not the same and I'm always leery of that sort of solution anyway, especially if it involves sharing my account password...

Instead, you can set up Picasa so that you have a secret email address that lets you simply email photos to your account and have them show up in your "drop box". Let me show you how...

First off, hop over to Picasa.Google.com and log in. On the top right you'll see a 'gear' icon. Click on it:

You want to choose "Photos settings", which brings you to a big configuration area that should look familiar if you have Gmail: it's a very similar design:

Under the "General" tab scroll down until you see the setting for Upload photos by email. It'll initially be unselected and look like this:

Click on the check box and new data appears, most importantly letting you specify a "secret word" that'll become part of the email address:

Why a secret word? Because you don't want the world at large sending photos via email to your Picasa account. Trust me on that one. :-)

Enter any alphanumeric sequence, preferably something mnemonic, and watch what happens to the address shown:

As you can see, if my secret word were ingeniously set to secret word, then the email address I'd use to send photos to myself on Picasa from my iPhone via email would simply be d1taylor.secretword@picasaweb.com.

Don't get too excited, though. That's not actually the secret word or address I use. In fact, I suggest that you don't use a dictionary word at all (e.g. a word that can be found in a dictionary) but mix it up a bit by perhaps substituting a digit for a letter or similar. Like "fr3sh" instead of "fresh" or "cart00n" instead of "cartoon". Easy and considerably better security.

Once you've got your Picasa email address set up, you can test it by sending yourself a photo via email from your iPhone. Once it arrives, it'll show up in your "Drop Box" like this:

Simply and easily done. Now, let's see what Google does with the new iPhone app, shall we?

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